Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

A friend of mine from college came over yesterday and we went to the rodeo. It was a lot of fun and more homoerotic than I remember it being. By which I mean, the rodeo clown tackled one of the pick-up people.

CLOWN: There's poo here. Send the pick-up guys to pick it up.
ANNOUNCER: That's not what the pick-up guys pick up.
CLOWN: Then what do they pick up?
ANNOUNCER: Cowboys.
::pause::
CLOWN: Oh, I bet they do.

It kind of makes me want to revisit that Sheppard/McKay rodeo AU that was bouncing around my head once upon a time. (Oh, God, seriously. Sheppard in those jeans with those slinky hips, fingers hooked in his belt loops as he leans against a trailer in the strips of shadow and light thrown backwards by the bleachers around the arena, teasing McKay with that voice. And McKay falling apart because there is that - Sheppard somehow succeeding at projecting horizontal while standing up - driving him crazy with want and frustration because as much as they click, Sheppard still sings badly to Johnny Cash and drinks questionable beer and swears by football like other people swear by the Bible.

Or, um. Something like that.

Basically, Rodney is doomed. But in a very, very good way. ;) )

They play music throughout the event. The weirdest part was when the music from Due South's opening credits came on over the speakers. Followed shortly after by "Oh What a Feeling" by Crowbar which is totally a Kowalski song and was used in the Due South episode "Eclipse." It was so weird!

Anyway. It was a pretty good night at the rodeo, though a bunch of people ended up with no time and so no score, which was sad. The clown was hilarious. (Sometimes he's not so much.) The trick riding was impressive. The trick roping was blah. (It was this group, though three of the girls were performing.)

It was a lot of fun. Elephant ears are delicious. Bleachers suck.

And then we came home and Mom's peach cobbler was delicious but made me want to kill myself. Damn you, body! Damn you!

Before tonight's Port meeting, I stopped by the library to return a couple of books (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Boy Meets Boy) and ran into one of the people I was hoping not to run into.

And now, even though I said I wasn't going to, I have agreed to help put together something for the county's centennial celebration. ::facepalm::

Why can't I just say no to people? I probably couldn't have even said no over e-mail.

But she really wanted help and was going to be working on it at city hall on Friday and I just couldn't say no. It wasn't until half-way through the Port meeting that I remembered one of the reasons for not helping was because I want to get both articles mostly written before Saturday. But a couple hours at city hall can just be a writing break.

I did tell her that I'm not really visually creative. When it comes to stuff like displays, I do better if people give me the materials and some instruction.

And tomorrow Dad's supposed to find some old tools that we can display at the county seat. He says we have some railway wrenches from sometime within the last 100 years lying around somewhere.

Plus, it is snowing. Maybe we will have a white Valentine's Day.

I'm sort of speechless right now.

I avoided the election all day because it was kind of driving me crazy, so my mom and I went to the movies (which I will post about later) and when we got out we heard the end of Obama's acceptance speech. Followed by the words "president-elect."

It made me cry.

\o/

Eddie Izzard is fantastic.

Even when your seats are waaaaay in the back.

Holy crap, that was fun.

Back from Seattle. It was a pretty good time.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was beautiful. I was reading in the Seattle Times that next April they'll be doing Swan Lake again which I loved when I saw it. So I'm thinking I'll be getting tickets for that and dragging Mom to it. Maybe Dad again.

The family birthday party for the twins was fun. Kay made her Chinese chicken salad and lasagna, two of my favorite things that she cooks. Plus, she mixed some vodka and cranberry juice and it was very good. Except half-way through my second glass I started feeling the alcohol a lot sooner and harder than I normally would at that point. Then I realized it was after five and I hadn't really eaten since breakfast. Not fun.

But before that, Tris and I played Bully on their Wii. omg. I hadn't laughed that hard in a while. I always end up laughing into tears playing games with Tris.

Then Monday Mom and I met up with Sara downtown and had dinner at Mexico. Hadn't seen her since graduation and it was wonderful to just sit and talk. We were at the restaurant for three hours and no one even bothered us to leave.

Yesterday we came home and then drove back to Ellensburg to see Ken Burns speak at CWU. He was really impressive. I mean, his documentaries are pretty brilliant so you'd expect the man to be impressive, but sometimes you're disappointed. Not the case here at all.

Okay, so David Sedaris? Was just as amazing as I was expecting him to be. No disappointments here.

It was fantastic and I am so glad that I got to go. It was like an NWPR party there! Those people I've listened to on the radio for what seems like forever? On the stage and in the audience and that was just fun to put faces to voices. Plus, when the lady at the door took our tickets, she asked us if we were interested in closer seats and then sent us to the manager-type-person. So instead of row R, we ended up in row F.

And then David finally came out and I basically started grinning like a fool. He read from several sources (including those not published in the US and his diary) and then there was a short Q&A session. It was two hours of hilarity, basically.

The first short he read was originally supposed to be on This American Life, but "the Powers That Be" decided that it was just a bunch of random things instead of a narrative of any sort and judged that it was pointless or useless or something, so he wrote something else. "If non-stop laughter is pointless."

After that he read some poetry about dogs (though he doesn't own a dog and doesn't really like them) where he rhymed some pretty interesting things with the help of his rhyming dictionary, which apparently "does all the work for you." He then read something from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and a piece from the New Yorker.

The piece from the New Yorker can be found here. His wife stirred to action then, and became almost sociable. “So this boyfriend,” she said. “Let me ask, which one of you is the woman?”

“Well, neither of us,” I told her. “That’s what makes us a homosexual couple. We’re both guys.”

One of my favorite parts of the evening, though, was when he told us about his experience at Yakima's YMCA. He's quit smoking. In order to take his mind off of smoking, he's taken up swimming, because it's an action that doesn't leave him wondering if something missing. "You can't swim and smoke." So they cleared a lane for him to swim laps in and he was fine until a nine year old approached him. They got to talking and he said that he hadn't been swimming for very long so the kid could probably beat him. This prompted the kid to propose a race. Which David won. At the end, the kid told him that it must be because God touched him and sped him up. To which David replied, "Well maybe God grabbed your foot and slowed you down." (I wish that I could say stuff like this when certain people I know say these kinds of things to me.) He then asked the kid where he learned stuff like that. "Church," the kid said. "Which church?" "A Godly one."

And then David grinned and laughed. It was great when he found something he'd noted or written or experienced so funny that he couldn't help but still laugh with us.

Wonderful experience. We didn't stay to have anything signed (I already have a couple of books signed). But today at Target Mom ran into Robin Rilette (!! Who hosts the classical music and saved my sanity while selling peaches this summer.) who said that it was crazy at the signing and took forever. Which makes me think leaving was a good idea. But it only took forever because David talked to everyone. Apparently he had a bag of hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles that he was handing out to people, too. So that makes me think, well gee, maybe we should have stayed. But I wouldn't have known what to say.

No regrets, though.

And I cannot recommend him enough.

I have a job interview today.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from my 19th Century European/French Novel professor asking the class for permission to publish our final essays.

trademybike got her birthday present and really seems to love it. This makes me all sorts of happy. :D

Now I get to go pick apples and pears off of the ground. Mmmm, smushy fruit salad.

Dad took EB and I out stargazing (I almost wrote "stargating." Wouldn't that be fun?) tonight. It wasn't quite dark enough to see everything and EB had to get to bed, so we're waiting until Friday 'round midnight to try again.

However, I did spot three meteors! It's too early for the Perseid meteor shower, but looking in my astronomy textbook, I'm wondering if I wasn't seeing a few of the Delta Aquarid meteors. Especially because that shower peaks around July 28-30. Hmm.

I really enjoyed the graduation dinner, but now I'm kind of depressed. You spend four years with a group of amazing people and then you move on. And, yes, I know that it's not as cut and dry as that, but I'm never going to sit in one of Tung's classes and listen to him read "The Waste Land" as Yoda or do his impression of Forrest Gump. And I'm never going listen to Bean get excited about grammar and bounce around the front of the room. Or have Weber discuss issues of translation or listen to Bullon-Frenandez read Chaucer with such joy. And I'll never see McDowell in his Donne and Shakespeare society/conference shirts or hear Koppelman sing bad poetry about her cat.

And that's what I'm going to miss. More than the students, who I don't feel odd keeping in contact with, I'm going to miss the faculty. I'm going to miss the actual classes and discussions and readings.

I don't know how not to be a student.

And I guess that's the thing about literature. (Well, and life.) You don't stop learning because you stop taking classes. You learn the things you need to continue learning and then you go out into the world and you read and interpret and write about everything.

After the dinner I left and then went back because I had to tell Dr. Koppelman just how much I appreciated her class last quarter. All of my college life, and before that, I've been interested in Regency and Victorian literature. Eighteenth century stuff. And while I'd had Survey of British Literature I with Dr. Bullon as a freshman, there's never enough time in those survey courses to really get a feel for anything. And then I took Masculinity in the Middle Ages and suddenly this whole world of medieval literature is opening up to me and it's exciting and I love it. That never really would have happened if it hadn't been for her class. So I had to tell her that.

I mentioned to Dr. Bullon earlier this quarter that I was sad that I was only now discovering this love for Chaucer when I'm so close to graduating. She comforted me with the fact that they've really only offered two classes that have focused on him quite so much and I've had both of them, so I shouldn't be too disappointed by the timing of this discovery.

In the end, the nice thing is that I can actually say that I have no regrets. I've loved my professors (even the ones that drove me crazy in class with their haphazard teaching methods) and my classes and my fellow classmates (except for a couple who were just odd, though they make for excellent caricature stories). I just don't want it to be over.

"Tao of Rodney" is on tonight. In which Rodney gets super powers and John uses air quotes.

I plan on watching it again. Because it's fantastic.

Plus, Daniel returns on SG-1.

And before all of that, we're going to the Seattle Youth Poetry Grand Slam. We're basically going for Natasha's hip hop class, but I'm excited. It'll be something different to do.

And, because other people have pointed it out, EW has come out with a list of the top 25 sci-fi movies/TV from the past 25 years. It's a weird list. I do think it's interesting that on board that's in reply to the list there's a bunch of "where's Buffy?" going on. I think, technically, BtVS is horror/fantasy. Not sci-fi. Which makes me wonder about Lost making the list, actually. I think I'd classify that as fantasy, too. Granted, I've only seen the first season. I guess it's just a thin line between the two.